ISLAMABAD — The courier who led U.S. intelligence to Osama bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan hailed from the Swat Valley, a one-time stronghold of militant Taliban fighters, Pakistani officials said Wednesday.

The officials identified the courier as Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed. He and his brother Abrar were shot dead in the U.S. Navy SEAL raid May 2 that also killed bin Laden and two other people.

The brothers apparently linked up with bin Laden after they returned to the Swat Valley from Kuwait, where their parents had immigrated.

Swat is about 70 miles north of the city of Abbottabad, where bin Laden had been hiding for about five years. The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the real names of the two brothers, said they were from the Swat Valley village of Martung.

The U.S. commando attack, conducted without notification of Pakistani officials, was a huge embarrassment for the country given that bin Laden's compound was in a military garrison city and only 35 miles from the capital, Islamabad.

Pakistan has denied suspicions of involvement in sheltering bin Laden and set up an independent commission to probe possible links and intelligence failures. Among the challenges is trying to determine whether bin Laden's support network spread beyond the brothers.

"I am sure he could not have lived without a local network. He had to get messages out. The kind of help that he needed to be there meant he had help from somewhere, some groups maybe," a senior Pakistani intelligence official said Wednesday on the usual condition that his name not be used.